Stanford held an event this week to honor alumni who have gone on to help shape the computer industry – and its social fabric. The celebration was held to honor contributions by grads who went on to help found Silicon Valley economic engines like Google and Yahoo, as well as recognize the impact of people like John McCarthy, who helped spawn the field of artificial intelligence.

David Patterson, president of the Association for Computing Machinery and a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley said Stanford deserves special note even among the four big computer science schools, including Berkeley, MIT, and Carnegie-Mellon. Not only did Stanford start early to make computer science a separate discipline, he said, but also it also emphasized the practical dimension of its research.

“What sets Stanford apart is the start-up culture,” said Patterson. “I have
this sense that it's an almost an unwritten rule that you have to start a
company to be a successful professor at Stanford.”

2 ] UMassOnline Reports Healthy Revenue, Enrollment Growth

UMassOnline, the University of Massachusetts' online education arm, said last week that its online program revenue grew by 29 percent and enrollment increased by 20 percent in fiscal year 2006. Revenue from online programs was $21 million, up from $16.4 million in fiscal year 2005. Enrollments reached 21,202, which was up from 17,661 in fiscal year 2005.

David Gray, chief executive officer of UMassOnline, attributed the growth to having “what students are looking for: high quality, accredited distance education programming delivered by world-class faculty from a world-renowned institution.” The program recently added a Master of Education for Science Teachers program.

An 18-year old senior at American Fork High School in Highland, Utah, was crowned winner of what has come to be known as the “Junior Nobel Prize,” the Intel Science Talent Search.

Shannon Babb, who started researching water quality at age 13, conducted a six–month longitudinal study to analyze chemical and physical properties along Utah’s Spanish Fork River. She concluded that humans, through urban and agricultural factors, have a negative effect on the water quality of the river. Babb, who wants to pursue environmental studies at Utah State, proposed that water quality problems can be resolved with a combination of restructuring and educating the public that household chemicals should not be poured down storm drains.

Second place went to 17-year-old Yi Sun of the Harker School in San Jose, Calif. Sun discovered new geometric properties of random walks, a mathematical theory with applications to computer algorithms and polymers. Third place was awarded to Yuan “Chelsea” Zhang, 17, of Montgomery Blair High School in Rockville, Md., who researched the molecular genetic mechanisms behind heart disease. Zhang implicated CX3CL1 molecules as contributing to plaque build–up in the arteries.

Six of the largest U.S. philanthropic foundations pledged to spend $200 million over the next five years to strengthen higher education in seven African nations. The investment includes more than $5 million to boost the Internet bandwidth available to a consortium of African universities via the Intelsat global satellite operator. The foundations include the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Over the past five years, the foundations contributed more than $150 million to build core capacity at universities in Ghana, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. Kenya has joined as the seventh nation this year. The Hewlett Foundation and the Mellon Foundation have also joined the partnership as contributors.

“This is an outstanding display of global citizenship,” said United Nations General Secretary Kofi Annan. “We need to train teachers and build up research capacity; we need to strengthen open universities and distance learning programs; and we need to ensure that African institutions have access to the latest technologies.”

The Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (Tekes) granted 1.8M Euros to establish a “Trustworthy Internet” group at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology, the Telecommunications and Multimedia Laboratory at the Helsinki University of Technology, and the Computer Science Department at the University of Helsinki.

The main objective of the project is to study the trust provisioning in the Internet. As changing the current Internet infrastructure is difficult, the project will explore the use of overlay networks to build and manage trust relationships between service providers and customers over networks. The project will focus on overlay access, application integration, identity management, trust and session management, overlay scalability, and measurements. Sponsors want it to have “the highest scientific and industrial impact.”

The University of Michigan Health System said it will start to make secure online consultations – webVisits – available to healthcare consumers. UMHS’s Briarwood Family Medicine will offer patients of participating physicians the ability to consult with them online using a clinically-structured webVisit.

A webVisit is an interactive online patient interview that collects relevant details about non-urgent symptoms and delivers them to the physician as concise, clinically-structured notes. Patients will access their physicians online. The technology for the project is from California-based RelayHealth Corp. UMHS will begin a 12-month webVisit pilot with physicians from the department of Family Medicine at Briarwood. If the pilot is successful, UMHS may roll the service out to other Family Medicine clinics. webVisits are provided to patients of participating physicians for a $30 out of pocket fee per webVisit.

CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY is the only monthly publication focusing exclusively on the use of technology across all areas of higher education. CAMPUS TECHNOLOGY serves as a complete resource for administrative and academic IT leaders and provides in-depth, aggressive coverage of specific technologies, their uses and implementations on campus. Featured topics include advanced networking, administrative systems, portals, security, electronic publishing, communication solutions, presentation technologies, course management systems, technology infrastructure, and strategic IT planning - all the important issues and trends for campus IT decision-makers.

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